Million-year-old mammoth teeth yield world's oldest DNA

[FfFfFfFF 58,128]

Scientists have sequenced the oldest DNA yet, smashing through a symbolic barrier in the study of ancient genomes and opening an unprecedented window into the evolution of North America’s extinct Ice Age giants—the Columbian and woolly mammoths.

The DNA comes from three mammoth molars found in Siberia in the early 1970s by Russian paleontologist Andrei Sher, a legend in the field for his mammoth research. 

The findings add surprising detail to scientists’ picture of how North America’s mammoths evolved. For one, the teeth’s ancient DNA strongly suggests that North America’s Columbian mammoth, one of the major North American mammoth species, is a hybrid that arose 400,000 to 500,000 years ago—a fact only revealed because the study’s older DNA dramatically precedes this interbreeding. “If we look at higher-order organisms like vertebrates, I can’t think of a single example where people have sampled before the origin of a species,” says study coauthor Love Dalén, a geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics.

Already, the new study is shedding light on how North America’s mammoths evolved. To the researchers’ shock, the new study’s DNA sequences are so old that they predate the origins of the Columbian mammoth, one of two major mammoth species that once roamed North America—giving scientists fresh insight into how mammoths evolved.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/million-year-old-mammoth-teeth-yield-worlds-oldest-dna

[GagaSine 7,464]

This is so cool. I wish I studied palaeontology. Maybe if free tuition is ever implemented I will.